Justice for Spammers?

We all dream of finding a way to strike back at the scammers and scumbags who stuff our inboxes with unwanted solicitations for porn, pyramid schemes, penis enlargement pills, and other junk. In Bruce Schneier’s Counterpane this week, I read about one spam artist who got a taste of his own medicine, big time.

Seems the notorious “spam king” Alan Ralsky gave a newspaper interview in which he bragged about his luxurious new home in West Bloomfield, Michigan. The details found their way onto Slashdot, where the readership tracked down his mailing address and organized themselves into an impromptu digital posse that began signing him up for catalogs, mailing lists, and the like. “Within weeks,” according to Schneier, “[Ralsky] was getting hundreds of pounds of junk mail per day and was unable to find his real mail amongst the deluge.”

Doesn’t it just warm your heart?

Gadget lust…

OK, I confess. I have a serious case of gadget lust. My current cell phone is more than two years old, so I’m replacing it with a
Siemens S46 Global Phone. It’s not the best-looking handset around, but it works with AT&T Wireless, it does Web stuff, and it’s compatible with GSM networks in Europe and the US. AT&T is literally giving them away. How could I resist? It should arrive any day.

I’m also vacillating over what should replace my three-year-old HP notebook. It has to be a Tablet PC, of course, and it has to be as light as possible. The
Toshiba Portege 3500 gets rave reviews and has the best combination of big screen, fast CPU, and expandability. At $2200 and up, though, it’s expensive.

Maybe the made-in-Taiwan SlateVision is a better choice? It costs at least $700 less, is one pound lighter, and uses the slate format instead of the Toshiba’s convertible format.

Decisions, decisions… Which would you choose?

Where’s Ed?

My favorite Webmoron points out that I’ve been, shall we say, missing in action for about a month. Well, at least someone noticed!

I’ve been in heads-down mode cranking out yet another book, this one an update to Special Edition Using Microsoft Office XP with Woody Leonhard. Needless to say, I’ve been buried in Word, Excel, Outlook and the rest of the Microsoft Office 2003 suite. Oops, I meant system. The marketing gurus at MS have decided that this isn’t just a collection of programs, it’s now an integrated system whose parts all work together in mostly perfect harmony. Well, not quite. But as someone who’s been writing about Office for a decade, I have to say this upgrade is impressive.

I’ve been using Office 2003 on my main production system now for more than six months, most recently with Beta 2. If you’re already an Office XP user, you’ll have no trouble making the transition. And if you live in Outlook, this upgrade is an absolute slam dunk, if for no other reason than the I-can’t-believe-it-really-works-this-well junk mail filtering. When I woke up at 5am this morning (after a restful four hours’ sleep), Outlook had successfully intercepted 29 pieces of spam, allowing the 7 good messages to make it through. On average, I get more than 100 pieces of spam each day, and Outlook is blocking about 90% of it, typically.

Oh, and I’ve also landed a gig with Microsoft.com, producing a series of every-other-week columns for the Windows XP Expert Zone. You can check it out for yourself here.

So I’ve been just a little bit busy…

OK, Lloyd, the ball’s in your court…

Surprise! An IE upgrade that’s not from Microsoft…

I’m always willing to give other browsers a try. Internet Explorer does a lot, but it’s far from perfect. For the past few months, I’ve been using Phoenix 0.5, a lean and impressive version of the Mozilla code base. It’s nice, but customizing it takes some effort, and as befits a version 0.5 product some features just don’t work. (Still, when all’s said and done I bet it’s going to be worth the effort. In fact, rumor has it the next go-round of Mozilla will be based on the Phoenix code.)

Several weeks ago, I switched to a different browser. I’m mighty impressed with Avant Browser so far. It’s got the three killer features that are missing in IE: tabbed browsing (multiple Web pages in a single browser window, with each one getting its own tab), intelligent pop-up blocking, and the ability to clean up history, cookies, and other potential privacy invaders.

Best of all, Avant is just a wrapper for Internet Explorer. Under the covers, it uses the IE HTML tools, which means compatibility is simply not an issue. It’s a free download, and it’s easy to configure. The author, Anderson Che, gladly accepts donations, but there’s no obligation to do so.

I’ve only encountered a few minor annoyances. Some add-ins, notably SideStep and the Powermarks Bookmark Manager, don’t work with Avant Browser. I also get occasional harmless error messages that are probably related to my, um, oddball hardware configuration rather than bugs in the software.

But those nits aside, this is one IE update that’s worth it. Even if it didn’t come from Microsoft.

Should you worry about CodeRed.F?

The mainstream press is whipping up fears about a new variant of the CodeRed virus/worm called CodeRed.F. I’ve already seen a few well-meaning souls post warnings implying that this new threat can strike people running any version of Windows. Well, not exactly.

As always, Symantec Security Response has a prompt and timely explanation of what CodeRed.F can and can’t do.

Here’s the bottom line: This virus, like the original CodeRed, affects only computers that are running Internet Information Services — in other words, those that are acting as Web servers. If you are using a normal desktop configuration of Windows, you need not take any special precautions.

Of course, some people actually do run IIS (or its older baby cousin, Personal Web Server), so that they can deploy their Web pages onto a local test site before going live with them. If you’ve installed IIS or PWS on your computer, you’re potentially vulnerable. (Not sure whether you’re running your own Web server? Type http://localhost in your browser. If it returns a Server Not Found error message, you’re safe.)

Of course, anyone running IIS should be especially vigilant about installing security patches for it. In particular, patch MS01-33 and patch MS01-44, both of which were released in summer 2001 (nearly two years ago!), protect against this infection. Norton AntiVirus signatures from August 2001 (and those of virtually every other leading AV software maker) also protect against it.

The real threat with this virus is that it is slowing down traffic on the Web as a whole because of all the servers around the world, especially in Europe and Asia, which have not had the proper patches installed.

Messenger pop-ups revisited

A few weeks ago, I posted an article on this site, entitled Stop those pop-ups (part 2), describing how to get rid of those nasty, obnoxious, annoying pop-up windows that seem to be afflicting just about everyone with a computer running Windows XP.

After checking in with some newsgroups, I’m now convinced that this is the #1 complaint of Windows XP users. These things seem to come out of nowhere, because the Messenger service (again, not to be confused with the Windows Messenger instant messaging program!) wasn’t a part of Windows 95/98/Me. Most people assume that they’re related to the pop-ups spawned by Web browsers. They’re not. They’re direct PC-to-PC messages from a sleazy spammer to you.

In fact, you should consider these pop-ups a great test of your PC’s security. If you’re getting these messages, your computer is dangerously exposed to hackers, crackers, and other attackers. You can shut down the Messenger service, as I outline in the article above, but that only solves the immediate symptom. To protect yourself from other, similar vulnerabilities, I highly recommend that you install a hardware router with port-blocking capabilities, or a software firewall, or both.

Become a Master Googler

I’m continually amazed at the number of people I meet who still don’t know about Google, the amazing search engine that helps you find just about anything on the Internet. Go to Google’s home page, type a word or phrase into the search box, click the Google Search button, and prepare to be amazed.

If you’ve already discovered Google, here’s how to do more with it. Go to the Google Web Search Features page and read about the advanced features available to anyone willing to roll up their sleeves. You can look up the meaning of a word, translate a word, paragraph, or entire page into another language, find phone numbers, track down a map of a street address, and do much, much more.

And don’t miss the Google Toolbar, a lightweight, easy-to-install add-in that puts a Google input box (and several more tools) into Internet Explorer, so you can search from any page…

How did we get along before Google?

Outlook Express Expertise

For years, I’ve been a fan of Tom Koch’s Inside Outlook Express page. Although I don’t use Outlook Express, just about everyone I know does, and this site has answers to questions you probably didn’t even know to ask!

Case in point: A friend called a few days ago. He’d been trying to move his wife’s e-mail messages and address book to a new computer, and he was getting a baffling series of error messages. We walked through the usual troubleshooting steps, and he was able to set up Outlook Express so that her email account worked just fine with a clean set of OE folders.

But… as soon as he restored her backed-up messages, everything went kerblooey. Trying to start Outlook Express produced nothing but a mystifying error message. After a little more experimentation, we determined that one of the e-mail folders was corrupted.

That’s when I decided to check Tom’s site. There I found a pointer to Steve Cochran’s OEHelp site and a marvelous free utility called DBXtract. I’ve recommended DBXtract for years, but I hadn’t seen it lately. It works directly with the DBX files that store Outlook Express error messages, allowing you to recover the saved messages when Outlook Express can’t.

If you’re having a problem with Outlook Express, check out Tom’s site. He’s spent a tremendous amount of time on it in the past year, and the effort shows. In fact, when I have OE questions, I recommend you skip Microsoft’s Knowledge Base and start with Inside Outlook Express instead. If you can’t find the answer here, maybe it doesn’t exist.

Stop those pop-ups (part 2)

In the last few weeks, I’ve received an increasing number of messages from people asking about how they can stop annoying pop-up ads that appear on their PCs without any warning. These ads aren’t like regular Web pop-ups. Instead, they look like dialog boxes, with the words “Windows Messenger” in the title bar.

Here’s what’s going on. The Messenger service (no relation to the instant-messaging utilities used by MSN, AOL, and Yahoo) was originally designed for network administrators and programs to send messages over a corporate network. A printer could pop up a window telling you you’re out of paper, or your IT guy could alert you that he’s about to shut down a file server for emergency maintenance.

Although this capability has been in Windows NT and Windows 2000 for years, sleaze merchants only recently discovered this service. The same clowns who sell bulk-mailing software now sell software that can tap directly into your Internet connection and use the Messenger service (a component of Windows, not be confused with the Windows Messenger instant messaging program) to spam you with these ads.

Because these messages look like legitimate Windows dialog boxes, they have the potential to fool users who haven’t heard about this trick. It’s a gross invasion of your privacy, and it ought to be illegal. Utilities designed to stop pop-ups spawned by Web sites will have no effect on these messages. Fortunately, you can block these jokers with any of the following strategies:

Use a hardware router or a software firewall.

Turn off the Messenger service.

You can read more about this topic and download a free utility that will automate the process of disabling this service at the
Stop Messenger Spam site.

Stop those pop-ups (part 1)

Is there ANYONE out there who actually has a positive thought about pop-up ads? I detest them, and I make a special point to avoid advertisers who use them. Thanks to my longtime pal Woody Leonhard, I can now recommend a great pop-up blocker for anyone who uses Internet Explorer. EndPopups.com Popup Manager is free, and it works better than any similar utility I’ve ever seen.

I don’t know what sort of magic the developers of this software use, but they’ve managed to catch just about every conceivable form of pop-up spawned by a Web page. The program itself is unobtrusive, adding a small red bar in the lower left corner of the browser window to indicate that it had blocked a pop-up. If the pop-up window is one you actually want to see (as is the case with some sites that use pop-ups for login prompts), you can click the big E icon to make the window appear.

Highly recommended.